Reckless: My Life by Chrissie Hynde, review: 'words of warning'

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Don't get her wrong. Chrissie Hynde says she's not defending rape. But she'ssent the internet outrage cycle into a spin by taking "full responsibility" for being sexually assaulted by a biker gang in Ohio in the early Seventies. While I think it's sad that she feels the need to suck up the blame for their violence, she's only talking sense when she says it's not a good idea for vulnerable individuals "to f--- around with people, especially people who wear 'I Heart Rape' and 'On Your Knees' badges."

She was just 21 at the time: an art school graduate from a conventional, suburban, middleclass home with an eye for the bad boys and a burgeoning appetite for the drugs that would kill half of her Pretenders bandmates within four years of their formation.

Here's what happened. She bumped into a group of the heavy bikers while visiting an ex-lover at the Cleveland Municipal Jail. "This," she writes in her appropriately named memoir, Reckless, "was the sort of place I got dressed up for. Lawbreakers - right on!" She was jamming Quaaludes down her throat as fast as she could and thought the gang looked "regal" in their rotting leathers.

Chrissie Hynde on The Kenny Everett Show in the SeventiesCredit:
REX Shutterstock

They invited her to a "party" and she only twigged that she might not be destined to have fun when she arrived at "a white slum that had 'Jeffrey Dahmer' written all over it […] The tattooed love boys methodically unchained a series of padlocks to reveal a dark and noticeably empty house, before shoving me into a dank den. I was led upstairs to another dark room with the smell of the dissection table. A party of one." She was ordered to strip and found herself considering their violent demands.

But Hynde is never preachy, and most of her book reads like a cautionary tale about the drink and drugs her generation believed would open their hearts and minds but ended up shutting them down. On this occasion, drugs got her into a terrifying position, but they also helped her to survive it. "The good thing about Quaaludes: I wasn't duly perturbed. I was getting experience." Later that afternoon she sketched the group's portraits and went on to date the one who dropped her home.

The story makes a shocking read for those of us who grew up admiring Hynde's ability to stand up and be counted in the Boys' Club of rock'n'roll, never seeking approval for her sexuality. As a teenager, I loved the deep, certain voice in which she delivered uncompromising lines like: "Your private life drama, baby/ Leave me out." I loved her self-possessed style. She seemed so cool and controlled behind that heavy, black fringe: a woman who knew and maintained her own boundaries.

Chrissie Hynde in 1994Credit:
Jonathan Player/REX Shutterstock

It's unsettling to read what she felt required to tolerate in order to be accepted into a world where she'd sit up front on tour buses, gazing out at the road on insomniac nights while her bandmates partied in the back with groupies in their dirty brown polyester-sheeted beds.

Hynde sympathises with those groupies: girls who gave their hearts to guys who'd forgotten them before reaching the next town. She thinks the contraceptive pill did little for the sexual liberation of her gender: "Women weren't in control of their bodies; the drug was. Taking procreation out of the equation was turning women into sex toys. No one seemed to mind."

Her first kiss is thrust upon her against her wishes, from the unlikely lips of Jackie Wilson. She'd gone to a concert with a friend and found herself lifted from her seat "like a sacrificial lamb too paralysed with embarrassment to protest" to receive a "salty experience" smacker from the soul singer.

Much later, as a successful artist in her own right, she is thrilled to wake up in bed with a naked Iggy Pop. "I directed my eyes into his, a sea of green with a bloodshot sun rising […] I'd won the Big Daddy jackpot! I'd been in love with this Class A piece of tail for my entire life. […] He let me come back to his hotel room before the show but made it perfectly clear that if I wanted to hang around from there on in I would have to keep my mouth shut."

Although she rambles at times and rushes at others, her sentences have the crisp, dry efficiency of her lyrics. There are great anecdotes about David Bowie, The Clash and the Sex Pistols. She nearly married Sid Vicious for her green card and is pretty vicious herself about Nancy Spungen, who she says "pussy-whipped" him. When she learns that Sid has stabbed Nancy in the stomach with a knife Hynde delivered a cutting: "Oh dear."

While the memoir doesn't let fans in on its author's songwriting process, we do learn that, despite her shyness, Hynde feels at home on the stage, not "like an actor, but like a vagrant who finds a nook at the side to hide in and crash out for the night".

Although she continues to perform, she admits that she has never got over the drug-induced deaths of her bandmates: guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon. Assuming unnecessary responsibility for the boys right to the end, she writes: "I'd taken Pete [Farndon, bassist] into my reckless world and lost him there."